All posts tagged Income Inequality

Is it morally acceptable for a small number of people to have most of the wealth if they “meritorious” or “good people”?

Or rather, is it morally preferable to have a society in which such enormous gaps don’t exist regardless of how “nice” those at the top are?

These efforts respond to widespread judgments of the individual behaviors of wealthy people as morally meritorious or not. Yet what’s crucial to see is that such judgments distract us from any possibility of thinking about redistribution. When we evaluate people’s moral worth on the basis of where and how they live and work, we reinforce the idea that what matters is what people do, not what they have. With every such judgment, we reproduce a system in which being astronomically wealthy is acceptable as long as wealthy people are morally good.

Calls from liberal and left social critics for advantaged people to recognize their privilege also underscore this emphasis on individual identities. For individual people to admit that they are privileged is not necessarily going to change an unequal system of accumulation and distribution of resources.

Instead, we should talk not about the moral worth of individuals but about the moral worth of particular social arrangements. Is the society we want one in which it is acceptable for some people to have tens of millions or billions of dollars as long as they are hardworking, generous, not materialistic and down to earth? Or should there be some other moral rubric, that would strive for a society in which such high levels of inequality were morally unacceptable, regardless of how nice or moderate its beneficiaries are?

Democrats ignore important issues like economic inequality at their own peril. Racism is important but it’s forest for the trees issue. More persons of color will benefit in the short and long run from addressing economic equality issues than by fighting white supremacists. Bannon and Trump get it and they bamboozled their followers into believing they would improve the economy. Of course history will show they didn’t improve economic opportunities for people of any color and they made racism popular again, but Democrats can give them license to do more of the same by chasing identity politics.

“The longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em,” he said of Democrats. “I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

But there are many more voters in Trump’s camp who still consider themselves Democrats. Some live in the much-discussed zone of despair, places where opportunities for people without a college degree are few, and the opioid epidemic rages. These folks are persuadable, if the message is economic hope — something that Obama understood, and Hillary Clinton never did.

This doesn’t mean that Democrats should not speak out when a cop kills someone for driving while black. Nor does it mean that Democrats should not join with progressive institutions — the military and forward-looking corporations among them — when Trump turns back the clock on transgender rights, or equal opportunity.

But you can’t bang just one drum. Trump has said demonstrably racist things many a time, from his birther obsession to his taco bowl tweet. He still won, “on a straightforward platform of economic nationalism,” as Bannon noted.

“As long as Democrats fail to understand this, they will continue to lose,” he said.

So, even though Trump now threatens to shut down the government that he runs over his insane and unpopular border wall, even though he’s told 1,000 verifiable lies since he’s been in office, his horrid character will not be enough to help the forces of good.

Another article hitting the same notes about income inequality and what we are missing about discussions of the value of labor and where the country should head.

We’ve got to stop glamorizing entrepreneurship and innovation. And we’ve got to stop seeing this path as the solution to our problems. This is not to say that higher ed, innovation, startups, small biz, and entrepreneurs aren’t necessary. They’re just not the solution nor should they be the goal for the majority of people. That’s like asking every high schooler to bet on a major league sports career as their future path.

We need to recognize the value of the ‘Maintainers’, the labor force that drives this country. We don’t need to put them on a pedestal, and we don’t need to cry about lost manufacturing jobs, but we need to make sure that this large group in the middle is doing well. Their work keeps the country afloat, not the innovators. We need to make sure they earn their share of the profits. We need to support policies which keep these wages growing not shrinking over time.

nothing against “innovators” such as Jobs and his ilk—it’s just that “maintainers” are doing so much more. “The vast majority of technologies that surround us and underpin our lives are not innovations,” Vinsel says. “And the vast majority of labor in our culture is not focused on introducing or adopting new things, but on keeping things going.”

The staff came across some articles which articulate what we are missing about inequality in most of our conversations. Labor is the bedrock of our economy and we should treat it as such. We should compensate it as such.

We often say that higher education isn’t going to solve our equality issues. Some folks aren’t meant to seek degrees. Besides if everyone had degrees the marginal value would be much.

We need to talk about a world in which labor itself is valued more equitably. If you put in a solid 8 hours a day your pay should be sufficient to sustain a modest life. Every year that becomes less and less realistic.

we need to focus more directly on labor-market policies that increase people’s earnings and increase the steadiness of their jobs. In the end, fighting income inequality is about fighting income inequality. It’s not about closing educational gaps or getting more people married, or creating a diverse pool of Fortune 500 CEOs.

If where you end up is totally dependent on your parents, or a set of random circumstances over which you have no control, and there’s no individual description of how you get to a stable place in the economic system, then we’ve lost the narrative about how to get ahead. And that’s where things get dangerous

Krugman points out the deceits we accept which paint our misperceptions about the wealthy in the US.

I hope we can break through the propaganda so often cited that the wealthy are job creators. Its just these type of lies which are the reason NobodyisFlyingthePlane. As he points out the really wealthy are not at all job creators, they are hedge fund managers.

Conservatives want you to believe that the big rewards in modern America go to innovators and entrepreneurs, people who build businesses and push technology forward.

The finance industry isn’t really as useful to us as is often believed.

Once upon a time, you might have been able to argue with a straight face that all this wheeling and dealing was productive, that the financial elite was actually providing services to society commensurate with its rewards. But, at this point, the evidence suggests that hedge funds are a bad deal for everyone except their managers; they don’t deliver high enough returns to justify those huge fees, and they’re a major source of economic instability.

Given that history, do you really want to claim that America’s top earners — who are mainly either financial managers or executives at big corporations — are economic heroes?

Next time you hear someone declaiming about how cruel it is to persecute the rich, think about the hedge fund guys, and ask yourself if it would really be a terrible thing if they paid more in taxes.

The disappearance of unions isn’t a good thing for America. I’d be happy to suggest a multitude of reforms they desperately need in order to stay viable and relevant, but little good will come of limiting the rights of workers to organize and collectively bargain. Right to work laws make sense on the surface, but their real effect is to eliminate unions.

Its very easy to forget what unions did for all workers – not just union members. Here is a brief list of benefits we all enjoy as a result of changes that labor unions championed and for which they are generally credited.

A few of my favorites are: 40 hour work weeks, weekends, OSHA, overtime pay. For even more exhaustive info on what unions do and have done for America follow this link:

http://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp143/

Why is it that employees don’t share in the rewards of their increased productivity? This is obviously a pro union source, but a comment at the end is worth sharing.

Without Unions, Wages Haven’t Come Close to Keeping up with Productivity or Inflation

Prior to the 1980s, productivity gains and workers’ wages moved in tandem. But from 1980 to 2008, nationwide worker productivity grew by 75 percent, while workers’ inflation-adjusted average wages increased by only 22.6 percent.

This means that over the course of the last 30 years or so, workers were compensated for only 30.2 percent of their productivity gains.

If American workers were rewarded for 100 percent of their increases in labor productivity between 1980 and 2008, as they were during the middle part of the 20th century, average wages would be $28.53 per hour–42.7 percent higher than the average real wage was in 2008.

It helps to look at the motivating factors behind recent pushes for Right to Work laws. Besides the eternal Red-Blue divide it’s corporate greed that under pins the movement.

“I think an important question to think about is: Why are big private companies spending a lot of money and energy fighting public sector unions?

“They want more free trade, lower minimum wage, the right not to pay sick leave, and all those things which are not per se about union contracts. But the biggest single opponent they have is the labor movement, even in its shrunken and weaker state.”

Lafer blames businesses and key business figures for lobbying to push such laws “not because of what unions are doing now for their own members but to get them out of the way on issues that will affect everybody else.”

These campaigns stigmatize unions and encourage people who are unemployed to resent unions rather than big business leaders, he argued.

One thing worth noting is that the states with Right to Work laws are not the ones typically or historically associated with the financial growth of our country. Absent from the list are Mid-Atlantic states, New England, the Rust Belt, California. Right to Work States are more likely the ones associated with agriculture and sprawling chicken processing plants (paragons of safe, healthy, well paid work environments).